Hidden Depths Text
The pictures in this series were all shot from my bedroom window in London during 2012. They are about the act of slow looking that photography lends itself to so well, rewarding such an approach with rich intense detail across the whole picture.
I have photographed trees for a number of years and have, on many occasions, ascribed different and sometimes pretentious meanings to them in an attempt to get at what they seem to represent. I think however for me, with the distance time can give, they are first and foremost visual forms. Their branches and leaves are like automatic drawings. Their seasonal changes can give colours that stun and their explosive blossoming in spring has a beautiful and relentless energy, particularly in the city-bound ones here photographed in the courtyard of my block of flats.
That said, I am not immune to the magic and mystical character of trees; there is a powerful sense of something other to be found on a late darkening summer evening in the deepest of greens that reside under the canopies at the edge of a wood, or in the fathomless inky blacks of spindly branches against the dusk sky in the middle of winter on a narrow country road. These sensations, I use this word deliberately, are almost primal in their intensity.
I think this is what Philip Larkin meant in his poem “The Trees” when he wrote: “Their greenness is a kind of grief”.
So while on an immediate level these are simple pictures of trees, they are also intricate tapestries of abstract form and mark that can engage and absorb the eye and, if I am lucky, the heart too.
December 2022
